Broadband News

The 'three strikes and you end up on the Serious Infringers List' (SIL)
scheme that is part of the Digital Economy Act, has as yet not taken effect in
the UK. The intention of the act is that broadband providers maintain a copy of
the Serious Infringers List of their customers, and upon a court order will
provide this to copyright holders or their agents who can then decide to pursue
serial infringers in court.

Each time a movie studio, record company or their agent sends a Copyright
Infringement Report (CIR), the broadband provider would record a 'strike'
against that user once they identify them based on the time of the alleged
incident, as well as the IP address. Once a user accumulates three strikes they
would be placed on the Serious Infringer List. The provider would also be
obliged to pass on the notification and the subscriber then has the opportunity
to appeal. It is also possible to appeal being added to the Serious Infringer
List itself.

Ofcom has a very important role to play, as it has a duty to draw up and
enforce a code of practice to regulate this process and it must establish an
independent body to evaluate appeals. The Ofcom report subtitled Options
for Reducing Costs looks closely at how much it estimates an appeals
process will cost. The cost of copyright infringement is being suggested as
£400m, and a likely cost of running just the appeals process is at around
£40m.

As no-one has run a system exactly like the one proposed, Ofcom has great
difficulty at estimating costs and the amount of appeals that are likely. The
report interestingly does not attempt to look at how accurate infringement
detection methods are. What is of concern to some will be that other than the
costs to a Copyright Holder of submitting the CIR, there is little pressure to
deter a scatter gun approach. This is where the appeals process kicks in
though, as one would hope that if the independent Appeals Body got a high
proportion of successful appeals for one Copyright Holder, action would be
taken to ensure accurate detection.

To give people some idea of the possible costs of appeal, Ofcom has
considered three prices, free, £5 per appeal or £10. In all the scenarios
considered, the money raised by the appeals does little to dent the cost of
running the appeals process which is estimated at £400 per appeal, but the
assumption is made that it will reduce the number of appeals. The Department
for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) have however decided that a £20 fee, to be
refunded on successful appeal, would be more appropriate and it hopes this will
stop people using appeals to disrupt the system. One serious danger is that if
people are deterred from appealing, and appear frequently enough on the lists,
they may be subject to court action by the Copyright Holder, and an
embarrassing result would be for there to be high profile failures in court
over the quality of evidence.

The issue of using IP addresses and detection technology used to detect
infringement has been brought into question by the ACS:Law situation. If Copyright Holders do plan to take
people to court one hopes that they have firm evidence. The issue of connection
hijacking via wireless is to some extent covered by a requirement on the
letters sent out by internet providers to cover securing your internet
connection. The need for Copyright Holders to be accurate with its data is
highlighted by the fact that even if just 5% of people (250,000 appeals) were
to appeal it would cost £100m to process all the appeals.

At the end of the day, it is unlikely Copyright Holders can totally stop
infringement, just in the same way they are unable to stop people lending out
DVDs to friends. Their only hope can be to reduce infringement to a reasonable
level, and to a great extent it is not even known if the £400m per year is
truly lost revenue. In cases where people are uploading content and making
money from this then the lost revenue argument stands, but in cases where
people are viewing content for free when otherwise they would never have bought
it even if it was £1 to own a copy, one wonders how much revenue that cost.

Comments

So everybody appeals then.

Simple.

Slim

audioslim

over 7 years ago

Or just get a seedbox for £12 a month...

No appeals
All your media catered for.

otester

over 7 years ago

this is a disgrace, uk government have taken away our right to a fair trial in court for which there is already legislation in place to deal with civil copywrite issues. so do wrongfully accused get compensation you ask! nope you are not entitled to anything.....

pigfister

over 7 years ago

£20 to appeal as a detterent so to stop embarrasement of the false positives.